Missionaries, Anthropologists, and Music in the Indonesian Archipelago

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Although the history of Indonesian music has received much attention from ethnomusicologists and Western composers alike, almost nothing has been written on the interaction of missionaries with local culture. This study represents the first attempt to concentrate on the musical dimension of missionary activities in Indonesia. In fourteen essays, a group of distinguished scholars show the complexity of the topic: while some missionaries did important scholarship on local music, making recordings and attempting to use local music in services, others tried to suppress whatever they found. Many were collaborating closely with anthropologists who admitted freely that they could not have done their work without them. And both parties brought colonial biases into their work. By grappling with these realities and records, this book is a collective effort to decolonize the project of making music histories.

Anna Maria Busse Berger is Distinguished Professor of Music emerita at the University of California, Davis and the author of The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, Medieval Music and the Art of Memory, and Mensuration and Proportion Signs.

Henry Spiller is Professor of Music emeritus at the University of California, Davis and the author of Erotic Triangles, Javaphilia, Archaic Instruments in Modern West Java, and Focus: Gamelan Music of Indonesia.
 

Contents

List of Illustrations 
Acknowledgments 

Introduction 
Anna Maria Busse Berger and Henry Spiller

PART I. EARLY MODERN MUSIC HISTORY IN INDONESIA
1. Iberian Sources for the Historiography of Musics in the Early Modern Moluccas (Maluku) 
David R. M. Irving
2. A European Music Treatise Published in Late Eighteenth-Century Batavia (Jakarta) 
Estelle Joubert and David R. M. Irving

PART II. MISSIONARIES AND LOCAL MUSIC IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
3. “I am in no way surprised that the Javanese can listen to it all night long”: A Nineteenth-Century  Dutch Missionary on Javanese Music 
Henry Spiller
4. The Issue of the Javanese Church Songs 
Bernard Arps

PART III. LOCAL CHURCH MUSIC IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
5. The Heathen in His Blindness? Missionaries, Empire, and Anti-colonialism 
David A. Hollinger
6. “Sing, Choirs of New Jerusalem”: Hymnody and Sincerity in the Christian Tobalands 
Julia Byl
7. A Missional Legacy: Musik Inkulturasi and Printing Localized Catholic Hymnals in Indonesia 
Emilie Rook
8. Gaya X: An Ethnomusicological Look at Lagu Inkulturasi 
Philip Yampolsky

PART IV. MISSIONARIES AND ANTHROPOLOGISTS
9. Reconsidering the Place of Missionaries in Ethnomusicological History: Jaap Kunst and the  Fathers of the Divine Word in Flores 
Dustin Wiebe
10. Jaap Kunst and the German Missionaries in Nias 
Anna Maria Busse Berger

PART V. TECHNOLOGIES OF INDOCTRINATION
11. History and Mythology in Javanese Performing Arts 
Sumarsam
12. Dakwah, Missionizing, and Wayang: Hindu, Islamic, Christian, Buddhist 
Kathy Foley

PART VI. TECHNOLOGIES OF PRESERVATION: ARCHIVES
13. Has “God” Made the Apparatus? Missionaries as Phonographic Mediators in New Guinea and Melanesia 
Sebastian Klotz
14. Epistemic Shifts and Ideological Persistence: Ethnographic, Archival, and Historiographical  Practices in the Legacy of Jaap Kunst 
Barbara Titus

Bibliography 
Contributors 
Index